


If The Creator of Your Canon

by babydraco



Series: Fannish  Beliefs Which Need  Reexamining [1]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Meta, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-20
Updated: 2016-02-20
Packaged: 2018-05-15 05:30:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5773153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/babydraco/pseuds/babydraco
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Captain America:  Civil War,   The Russos,  Stucky,  queerbaiting and the state of slash in 2016, aka  "just because they're laughing with you and not at you doesn't mean they ship it".</p>
            </blockquote>





	If The Creator of Your Canon

I've seen people claim that the pairing of Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes will not happen in the MCU because "Disney is a conservative company". 

Disney is not a “conservative company”. Disney goes where they think the wind is turning. 

Disney is in it to make money. They're such a behemoth of an organization that it's ridiculous to say "Disney believes this", or "Disney believes that." The only thing they believe is that they should be the world's largest producer of mostly family friendly entertainment. But because they're the world's largest producer of family friendly entertainment, that means they constantly have to balance the demands of their customers, a group so wide and diverse that “family friendly” is a difficult concept to pin down. For example, they've always had a love/hate relationship with the conservative Christian community (specifically North American evangelical Protestants). Since, obviously, conservative Christians are huuuge patrons of family friendly entertainment, they have big families and they don't like to watch anything rated higher than PG13, they traditionally haven't had many other choices if they're also seeking out quality. Disney are capitalists and don't want to limit their customer base in any way, but every time they try to move with the times and expand their definition of “family friendly”, conservative Christians pitch massive global tantrums and boycott everything owned by Disney. They don't like not being the ones who get to define what "family friendly" means (they *lost it* when Disney started hosting dedicated park weekends for gay families). I have this theory that the whole reason Disney financed and distributed the first two _Chronicles of Narnia_ movies was to suck up to the conservative evangelical Christian community in America as everyone was doing during the Post 9/11 Bush years. It looked, briefly, like the conservative evangelical Christians were poised for a massive cultural takeover and everyone was trying to hedge their bets. Because after _Prince Caspian_ made a  &%# ton more money in Europe than it did here and Obama got elected and the cultural tide started to obviously turn again, Disney dropped the franchise cold turkey. It went from “we totally love the Christian community” to “new phone, who dis?” _overnight_. 

Disney owns ABC, the network which airs _How to Get Away with Murder_ , and _Modern Family_. I would imagine that when it comes to the question of whether it's Disney or Marvel that's squeamish about gay characters, Marvel is the real problem. Marvel is the company that has the actual restrictions on gay characters. And the MCU was up until recently being run by a stodgy old man who didn't like to take risks or spend money and donated to Trump and said things like “I don't believe in female superheroes”.

Does that mean that Kevin Feige was just waiting for Ike Perlmutter to go away to let loose with canon Stucky? No. It means things will get better, like, the idea of a Black Widow movie is now in the cards in a way it wasn't before, it does not mean things will get gayer. 

Because what “Stucky” means to the writers and producers and directors and actors is not necessarily the same thing as what it means to the fans. Times have changed, and the cast and writers of the Cap films are not angry or offended by the idea of Steve/Bucky. Ed Brubaker tweeted something that appeared to indicate he's okay with MCU Steve/Bucky slash, (although it seems like he didn't know people have been slashing them since 2007). The Russos have already said people should feel free to interpret things how they want despite not having intended the relationship as anything other than brotherly. Chris Evans has a gay brother, Anthony Mackie has played gay and so has Frank Grillo. RDJ is bisexual. Sebastian Stan is uh...Sebastian Stan. Chris Pratt found it flattering that fans think he's so hot that they want to write porn about him getting it on with his costars. So when they joke about it, they're laughing _with_ us, not _at_ us. 

They want to be in on the joke. But what makes this awkward is that they _seem to think it's a joke in the first place_ , even if they aren't being mean about it and they don't care that it's happening. I don't think they really understand how _desperately seriously_ the fandom takes some of these pairings. When they make jokes, fans don't interpret it as jokes, they interpret it as endorsement, as encouragement, as _promises_. There is an extremely dangerous level of anticipation building, whether it's fans who honestly deeply believe canon Stucky is coming or fans who just really really hope. And I'm not going to be the Stop Having Fun Guy and say people shouldn't dream and hope. But if they don't get at least a little bit of what they want, I'm afraid of what's going to happen. Fandom is different in 2016, fans all across the board have been given reasons to hope, with the vastly changed landscape re gay characters in English language media, that they can actually _have_ those canonical slash pairings. Until about five to eight years ago, they would have been content with a cast and crew who didn't condemn them and were "in on the joke" and threw them a bone once in awhile, and with creators letting it slip after the show went off the air or the book series ended, that one of the characters had been gay the whole time. And they would have drawn a neat line between what happened in canon and the alternate universe in their head. There's no longer any reason why fans shouldn't feel that their favorite slash pairing has an equal chance at canon, younger fans are no longer even bothering to question the idea that potential same sex pairings of characters initially designated as straight have an equal right to exist as canon. They're not going to meekly accept anything else at this point. "Stucky" is the number one slash pairing in the MCU fandom and even Marvel UK recently joked about it. It's all adding up to this incredibly weird tension where everyone knows now that this is a Thing but nothing is actually being done about it because Marvel can't seem to decide if they want to encourage it or not but it may reach a point where they're forced to fish or cut bait. The Russos should talk to Joss Whedon about what happens when the fans push you off the pedestal they put you on and how far the fall is. It doesn't take much, either. I know that it's ultimately not up to them, that decision is too big to be put in their hands, but they do have the power to decide whether or not they're going to let the audience think they could and might do something about it. 

The Russos should have left their polite and reasonable response to the Chinese media as their only response on this issue. Instead, they're continuing to joke with us about it, only _they are the only ones who think this is a joke_. I keep running into fans who have literally no ability to tell the difference between when the creators or actors or _other fans_ are kidding and when they're not. 

This can so easily devolve into accusations of "queer baiting", aka stringing the audience along, using vague gay subtext to tease the audience into thinking that a canon gay pairing is just around the corner but never intending to deliver on that. Queer baiting can be a deliberate marketing ploy, but it can also happen by accident due to the writers and actors thinking it's okay to kid around about characters being gay because they figure no one would ever seriously believe it was true. 

Sometimes, the showrunners and writers and actors honestly had no idea that they were creating something that the audience interpreted as a gay romance. It happened with the fan preferred pairing of Swan Queen (Regina Mills/Emma Swan on _Once Upon a Time_ ). The fans had gotten it into their heads that not only did Lana Parilla and Jennifer Morrison know their characters were being shipped, but were actively supportive of it and doing it on purpose and that the writers might be in on it too. Someone finally asked, and the annoyed, befuddled and dismissive response from the writers and actors, who had absolutely no idea any of this was going on, ignited a verbal riot in the fandom that resulted in Swan Queen "bad apples" actually threatening cast and crew. The writers said there would be no Swan Queen, they never promised there would be because they didn't know it was a thing, and they've stuck to it. That's not queer baiting. 

It's a _little_ queer baiting that they promised there would be an actual gay romance for another fan preferred lesbian ship (Mulan/Aurora), had that gay character (Mulan) try to come out then immediately tore that couple apart and demoted both characters to glorified extras...while repeatedly promising that they'd be back and have a big storyline. But again, it might not be so much that the writers are homophobic or that Disney is homophobic but that Disney keeps forcing the show to push its own intended plot arcs aside and rearrange their entire show universe, for plots that shill whatever Disney property Disney wants publicity for. I don't think it's ideological, considering the other shows ABC airs, although I do think ABC has, for some reason, decided that the viewer demographic for _Once_ , in spite of all evidence to the contrary in objective reality, is made up of people who only want to see het romance. Because networks do that. They decide that the "brand" of each tv show will be compartmentalized and treated certain ways according to the audience they're hoping to draw for the show. A tv show has a certain expected stereotypical audience, and they cater to that, even if, _even if_ it becomes clear that the actual audience is something totally different. Instead of changing to fit audience expectations, networks have been known to punish the show instead. They do this by attempting to drive off the unwanted audience, or they do it by canceling the project. See the above mention of Disney's rapid Heel Face Turn when _Prince Caspian_ failed to win over the evangelical audience. Or when FOX cancelled _Firefly_ because a space opera by Joss Whedon attracted a huge, passionately dedicated audience of women and male geeks, rather than whatever it was they _expected_ to happen. Or when The CW briefly tried to court the "straight males 18-30 audience" by deciding that certain shows, like _Angel_ and _Supernatural_ , were their "boy shows" and trying to turn those shows into something women wouldn't want to watch, so that men would. 

_Supernatural_ is definitely queer baiting. They know, at this point, that Dean/Castiel is the only reason anyone's still watching but still refuse to do anything about it. The _Planet Hulk_ comic, I saw as queer baiting. The only way I will reverse my position on that is if _Planet Hulk_ was a test run to see if mainstream comic audiences (aka straight white nerdbros) would accept a queer Captain America and Bucky or if the book's creative team ever confesses that they were told they had permission to go there, but then had that permission ripped away at the last minute.

I feel like we'd probably see a queer Cap in the comics _first_ , if it was ever going to happen. Because comics are easily retconned. If it met with a bad reception, they could always pull some narrative trick, like claiming it was all a dream or simply immediately moving on and pretending it never happened. The MCU doesn't have the room to do that. Stopping a plot point in the MCU would be like pulling the breaks on a speeding train, and if they screw it up, or if people hate the idea, it'll be a massive public screw up on an international level which no one will ever let them forget. I'm not sure Marvel realizes that it could end just as badly if they _don't_ provide a main pairing of queer characters, preferably one the fans have clamored for as it could if they got brave and did it. But most of the MCU was planned years in advance and is very tightly designed so there's little room for suddenly springing new, shocking character developments. Even if, ironically, the MCU has more new, casual fans, and if the MCU had made Cap (or some other major character) gay or bi from the start, that massive new audience of people who don't read comics probably would've just gone with it. 

I hope I get to be wrong about this. I hope I get to eat a lot of crow with a side of humble pie.


End file.
